News
Rivian’s RJ Scaringe talks on-site farming plans for employees, battery storage solutions
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recently shared insights about the company’s psychology in a livestreamed conversation with professional rock climber Alex Honnold and Rich Roll, a long-time wellness advocate and endurance athlete. As Rivian develops the manufacturing capabilities necessary to build its all-electric R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV at market scale, serious consideration is going into how to harness their team’s energy into an industrial system that works for everyone involved.
“So, industrial systems you have very often are very much class-based system – the white collar workforce, the blue collar workforce – there’s a whole host of things that lead those two sides to often having friction. We see how unions have come in to sort of help try to make those two work a little bit better together. But, a big part of what we’re doing right now is actually mapping out and thinking about the psychology of our company and the psychology of this facility,” Scaringe detailed during the event.
One of the unique things Rivian has inherited during its growth into a full-fledged auto manufacturer is the work force from the 2.6 million square foot plant the company purchased from Mitsubishi. Scaringe described the human story of the facility as “remarkable”, citing how many of the people currently there were part of the original launch team that later had to shut the facility down.
“So, 1989-1990, there are people that are 21-22 years old, they launched the facility….25-30 years go by, they’re part of the team running it, building it, now have to shut this facility down,” Scaringe described. “When we bought the facility, we not only just got the hardware, the acreages of land…[Now] we’ve got a team of people that’s passionate about restarting the facility.”
The company hopes the motivation to restart the plant under a Rivian badge will carry over into a win-win for all involved.
“It’s really remarkable. I mean, I think we’ve got a gift to work with in terms of that level of energy and that passion to bring it back to life,” the CEO said. “As we think about how do we take this gift that we’ve been given in terms of a workforce that’s so motivated, and how do we challenge a lot of the conventions that have been built up in terms of industrial systems…we’re doing a lot of things in the facility to really take that energy and supercharge it, really harvest it.”
One of the ideas Rivian is working to benefit on-site employees utilizes the resources inherited from the plant itself. The acreage surrounding the actual facility isn’t entirely needed for production purposes, so the car maker is planning to partner with local universities for food production from ground to plate.
“We have 508 acres at the plant, a very small percent of which actually has the plant occupying it – most of it’s just grass. We’re gonna be turning a lot of that into an area to grow food. And we’re gonna run that in partnership with some of the local universities through their agriculture programs to grow food locally on our site…and then that food’s gonna be served in our facility with students that are learning from top chefs we’re bringing in to run the food services in our facility, and we’re gonna provide incredible food to our plant team regardless of what part of the plant you work in,” Scaringe revealed.
“[That way]…there’s true equity. Every employee is part of this mission of bringing this facility back up. And that positive energy that we’re establishing at the plant, we want it to be a benchmark for how industrial systems are run – the collaboration, the communication between groups, between our other facilities.”
The conversation with Rich Roll and Alex Honnold primarily involved another part of the company’s psychology – helping to accelerate widespread adoption of renewable energy. Rivian has partnered with the Honnold Foundation to use the electric truck maker’s “second-life” auto batteries for a micro-grid solar system in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico. Through this project and others in the future, older battery cells that are no longer efficient for electric vehicles are repurposed into stationary energy storage units.
Adjuntas was selected as their first project site due to the town’s need for energy assistance after struggling in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The Honnold Foundation and Rivian will be using 135 kWh battery packs from R1T and R1S development vehicles for that particular grid project; however, cells going into Rivian’s production vehicles have been purposefully designed to have a “second life” in energy storage. The move towards energy projects marks a huge step for Rivian, signaling its expansion beyond the manufacture of all-electric luxury adventure vehicles.
Rivian’s first vehicle deliveries to customers are still planned for the end of 2020. Scaringe said during the event that around 800 members of their preorder community, i.e., reservation holders, were in attendance at the event with Roll and Honnold, so a further manufacturing update was provided with that in mind.
“There’s a lot of stuff happening [at the plant]. We’re moving equipment, we’re putting new equipment in. We’ve got amazingly talented people working day and night to bring that facility up and start delivering cars as quickly as possible,” he promised.
Watch RJ Scaringe, Alex Honnold, and Rich Roll discuss the Honnold Foundation and Rivian’s facility details in the video below:
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
